In today's culture, it is possible to make money in just about any position at all. You can go to college and get a job as an engineer, or a pharmacist, or a lawyer, or even an archaeologist or an oil derrick underwater welder. It really is possible to do just about anything. In addition, of all those things, few studies or careers are more fascinating than the study of that one subject that has fascinated humanity since the first misty darkness of history: the human mind itself. Such is the job of the psychologist.
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The word “psychologist” comes from two Greek words: “psyche” and “logos”; literally, “soul-word,” actually, “study of the human spirit.” Essentially, a psychologist studies and works with the human mind and it’s operation. This may include everything from behavioral patterns to the study of knowing, or cognition, the study of disorders, learning ability, child development, and any number of specialized fields, careers, and jobs within psychology itself.
For instance, an experimental psychologist is very different from a child or school psychologist, who is herself very different from a social psychologist. It is important to know the difference between these different careers, as they involve very different sorts of work and vary from salary to salary. If you are considering a career in psychology as a school psychologist, an experimental psychologist, or any other position in the field, you would do well to do your research beforehand. A doctorate is no light matter – if you intend to spend the next years of your life in college to earn a doctorate in psychology, you had better know what you are doing and where you are heading.
There are two sides to every field; research and application. In normal medicine, for example, some doctors’ careers are spent applying the medical knowledge of the field to heal people, and never do any research. On the other hand, some medical doctors and medical technicians are research doctors and are dedicated to increasing the knowledge in the field and expanding the limits medicine can reach. Both sides of every field are critical; if every doctor was a practitioner, no new research could be done, while if every doctor was a researcher, no one would ever receive the benefit of the research.
In psychology, experimental psychologists provide the research backbone of the field. It approaches the human mind—the psyche—as an essentially predictable and diagnosable part of the human body, which it is possible to heal if wounded and to improve if necessary. It does this by experiment, and the success of experimental psychologists certainly seems to support this idea. Experimental psychologists tend to discount the sort of classical idea of psychology, of a psychologist with individual cases interviewing a patient sitting on a couch. Instead, experimental psychologists tend to favor larger psychological experiments used to examine human behavior across the board; the Milgram experiments at Yale in the early 1960s examining human responses to authority and conformity are one such example.
A career in experimental psychology means one of two things: either working under your own government grants, likely at a major research university of some sort, or working in the corporate field developing psychological science for companies. Examples of that might, for example, include testing the efficacy of a major ad campaign or researching better how to reach the public with word or knowledge of some particular product. An example of this is the corporate work done into the concept of viral marketing, which is turning out to be a far more powerful method of advertising than anyone had originally anticipated—and one which could not have been used to its full potential if it hadn’t been for experimental psychologists.
Obviously in this field the jobs and careers available as well as the potential salary one could earn, will vary greatly. Salaries vary depending on the sort of government grants you work with or the types of companies – do some further research into any specific field of experimental psychologists today and see if they offer what you are looking for in a psychology profession.